Does the term "extension office" mean anything to you? Me neither, at least until I was Googling on soil testing and ran across this useful article , which says (among other things): "The first thing I recommend is that you check with your county's extension office...you can send [your soil sample] to them for analysis."
I found "my county's extension office" a little baffling ("extension" of what?), but as always, Google is your friend and mine, and I discovered that there's a nationwide program affiliated with (run by? funded by? I'm still not clear) the US Department of Agriculture called the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service. According to their website:
All universities engage in research and teaching, but the nation's more than 100 land-grant colleges and universities, have a third critical mission—extension. “Extension” means “reaching out,” and—along with teaching and research—land-grant institutions “extend” their resources, solving public needs with college or university resources through non-formal, non-credit programs.
Although I was briefly diverted learning about land grant institutions (does anyone else lose vast amounts of time following interesting but irrelevant information threads on the internet?), eventually I wound up at my handy-dandy local extension office's soil test site. Check it out - for $9 they will tell you (almost) all there is to know about the dirt in your yard!
And because I like to post pictures, here's one of a tray of dirt, gathered per the instructions and drying in the sun.
Ain't that the darndest thing? I love this country.
Comments (1)
Cha, I thought link distraction was what the Internet was all about. I call it the 'new learning', kinda like the new math they used to teach, until it got old.
Posted by Perley | October 1, 2007 3:45 PM
Posted on October 1, 2007 15:45